In Türkiye this weekend we’ll get closer to finding out the political life expectancy of its populist-authoritarian movement, one that emerged early this century as it wrapped majoritarian ethno-nationalism around a charismatic leader.
When public polling was stopped 10 days out from this Sunday’s vote, Türkiye’s 69-year-old president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was lagging behind Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the party of modern Türkiye’s founder Kemal Atatürk.
Kılıçdaroğlu has been boosted with an unlikely coalition of six opposition parties, from the nationalist İyi Parti (“Good Party”) to the left-liberal Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Odd bedfellows can play to fears of chaos as a similarly diverse coalition last year found when it challenged authoritarian-populist Hungarian Prime Minister (and Tucker Carlson fan-favourite) Viktor Orbán.
But surely this time Erdoğan has too much baggage, including cost-of-living pressures with inflation peaking at 85% last year before falling to “just” 44% last month, and related currency crises, in part due to Erdoğan’s unorthodox conviction that interest rates push up, rather than constrain, inflation.
He’s also suffering from what’s seen as a bungled response to February’s earthquake in south-western Türkiye, which left a reported 50,000 people dead.
His opponents will be nervous. There are plenty of stunts that Erdoğan could yet pull out of his bag of tricks. This week he announced a last-minute 45% pay rise for public workers.
Populists know how to pander for popularity, at least among the majority of those they see as the “real” people: the Turkish Sunni majority, particularly those living outside the large metropolises of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The outsiders? The large Kurdish minority or the heterodox Alevi Shia-aligned sect, including, according to a surprise election video, Kılıçdaroğlu.
In a young country like Türkiye, this weekend’s vote looks set to be the first election determined by millennials and gen Zs. About 6 million under-25s (out of about 65 million voters) are expected to vote for the first time. Many have been alienated by the crackdown on dissent after the failed 2016 coup.
Then there are the 3.5 million voters in the Turkish diaspora, including 20,000 who have voted in Australia with some questionable practices. Last time around, the expat vote went close to two-to-one for Erdoğan, in line with a global trend that’s seeing emigrant communities supporting nationalists at home. (There’s evidence of that trend in Australia, too.)
Erdoğan is more than just another populist strongman. He’s the OG prototype, with 20 years running the show. He became prime minister in 2003, shifting to a newly empowered executive president in 2014. He’s been an inspiration to those who’ve come after, from Hungary’s Orbán through to India’s Narendra Modi (with Donald Trump in the US along the way).
He built what a leading writer on the new populism, Jan-Werner Müller, calls the “shared authoritarian-populist art of governance … a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism”.
It’s a majoritarian pandering around the leader’s cult of personality, with the politicisation of the country’s liberal institutions (including, in Türkiye, the armed forces). It relies on polluting the information environment through digital misinformation, state capture of traditional media and attacks on journalists and independent media. (As the Turkish election takes place, 50 journalists are watching from prison.)
It’s matched with a development strategy for economic growth built on crony capitalism and cash payments to in-groups rather than the neo-liberal Washington consensus or a social democratic welfare state.
Like other modern autocrats (*cough* Modi), Erdoğan has weaponised the majority religion, overturning key elements of Atatürk’s secularism, including the long-standing ban on women wearing the headscarf. Recently his party embraced the global right’s war on LGBTQIA+ communities.
Like Trump, he has a confidence that carefully curated democratic laws and norms are to be blown past if they get in the way. Right now, for example, he is getting around the ban on a third-term presidency by calling elections one month early, enabling him to claim that his second term was cut short.
The lure of the third term is the great white whale of autocrats. It’s a tricky ploy to pull off. Sri Lanka’s populist president Mahinda Rajapaksa was surprisingly defeated in his 2015 run for a third term. Vladimir Putin’s election for a third consecutive term is still to come in what could be postwar elections next year.
Erdoğan’s strategy is to force the first round to a run-off in two weeks, while grabbing control of the parliament through various alliances (including an eyebrow-raising deal with a fringe Islamist Kurdish group). The opposition is hoping Erdoğan’s third time will be a step too far for Turkish democratic sentiment.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, we’ll get another indication of the post-COVID strength of the authoritarian-populist moment when we see the count in this week’s election in the key southern Indian state of Karnataka, home of the modern tech capital Bangalore (and setting of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City, a magic-realism take on the back and forth of liberalism and authoritarianism).
Exit polls are pointing to a defeat for the ruling BJP, despite Modi’s “perpetual campaigning”. It’s just one state (albeit of 70 million people), but a win for the opposition will be read as suggesting that Modi, too, may be facing his own third-term challenge.
